Video: Looking at the Action Bar toolkit

One of the first things you'll notice when you look at Premiere Elements 11 is just how clean the work area is. We've got a monitor with playback controls, and we've get a timeline, and pretty much everything else is hidden in pop-up panels that are launched by clicking on the tabs and buttons around the outside of the interface. Now, a large numbers of these tools are launched from buttons on the Action bar. That's that little bar that runs along the bottom in the interface. If you have Photoshop Elements, that has a similar Action bar along the bottom and if you have the Elements Organizer, which comes with Premiere Elements, that, too, has its own little Action bar, and it's a place where a lot of the tools that you'll use in Premiere Elements are docked.

Watch the Online Video Course Up and Running with Premiere Elements 11

2h 54mBeginnerNov 28, 2012

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Whether you're new to the program altogether or a pro who needs a refresher on the latest features, author Steve Grisetti gets you up and running quickly with Premiere Elements 11, the affordable and intuitive video-editing program from Adobe.

The course walks through the entire editing workflow, from importing and organizing your raw assets, to timeline editing in Quick view and Expert view, to sharing your work on DVD, Blu-ray, or on the web. Along the way, you'll discover how to enhance your basic videos with voiceover, slow motion, transitions, titles, and a solid soundtrack. In less than three hours, this course will show you what you need to know to create polished gems from almost any kind of raw footage, from tape-based DV, to AVCHD, to smartphone and iPad video footage.

Looking at the Action Bar toolkit

One of the first things you'll notice when you look at Premiere Elements 11 isjust how clean the work area is.We've got a monitor with playback controls, and we've get a timeline, and pretty mucheverything else is hidden in pop-up panels that are launched by clicking on thetabs and buttons around the outside of the interface.Now, a large numbers of these tools are launched from buttons on the Action bar.That's that little bar that runs along the bottom in the interface.If you have Photoshop Elements, that has a similar Action bar along the bottomand if you have the Elements Organizer, which comes with Premiere Elements, that,too, has its own little Action bar, and it's a place where a lot of the tools thatyou'll use in Premiere Elements are docked.

In the lower left we have an Undo and a Redo button.I don't have any Redo because I didn't undo anything to redo, but there's also abutton for launching the Elements Organizer.The Tool button on the Action bar will launch many of the tools in PremiereElements, and we look in depth at a couple of these tools in some of our other movies.We have an Adjustments button, which when we click on that will launch theAdjustment panel, which can also be launched from the button here on the rightside of the interface.We can launch the Audio Mixer. The Audio Mixer is a tool for monitoring thelevel of your audio tracks for your video;it's also a dynamic tool that can be used to change the levels of your audio asyou are working, and we look at that in one of our other movies.

Freeze Frame will create a freeze frame of your video, which we have the option,as you can see, by clicking on a button to either insert it into your movie orto export it and save it as a separate photograph, which you can edit in Photoshop Elements.The Movie Menu tool is actually a library of movie menus, and we use that when wecreate disc menus and DVD menus.We'll look at that more closely in one of our other tutorials.Narration launches the Narration tool, which we look at in another of our tutorials.

The Pan and Zoom tool we'll look at in depth in another tutorial.The Smart Mix and Smart Trim tools are automatic tools in Premiere Elements.Smart Mix will mix the audio levels for you automatically, based on criteria that you provide.The Smart Trim tool will look over your video and it will recommend cuts orautomatically make cuts for you on pieces that it thinks are of low quality or poor quality.Time Remapping and Time Stretch are tools that will actually slow down orspeed up your video, and we look at them in depth in one of our upcoming tutorials also.

Along the Action bar here are Transitions, Titles & Text, Effects, Music, and Graphics.This is kind of cool. When you're over in Quick view, if you look at Graphics,you'll only see a small library.I am doing a hover over the top here and you see, when I am at the top edge, I candrag to extend this panel size a bit.And you see you get a small selection of clipart.In Expert view, you get over 350 pieces of clipart, in a variety of categories.The cool thing is that some of these are actually animated, so you have ananimated angry face, animated butterfly, little stars going around somebody likethey got bonked in the head.

And my personal favorite here are thought and speech bubbles.Now you notice a lot of these, by the way, have a little blue flag over theupper-right corner. I am extending the panel just a bit by dragging on the top.That little blue flag is an indicator that the media has not yet been added to your computer.One of the things that Adobe did to kind of streamline the whole installationprocess is that there are a lot of templates, a lot of effects, some instantmovie themes, and the clipart here that are not added to the program or added toyour computer when you install the program; they come down as needed.

So when you select them and add them to the timeline, it just takes a second orso and they're are downloaded to your computer.I want to just drag one here, drag this speech bubble onto the video right ontothe monitor, and you see it's added.I can size it by grabbing the bounding box or just dragging on these littlecorner handles, position it as needed.And it edits just like a title.In other words if I double-click on it, it opens up in the TitleAdjustments workspace.I can customize the text and when I leave the Adjustments area and return tomy Timeline, simply by clicking on the Timeline, you see it's in position with my custom text.

So there are a lot of great tools in the program, hidden away and yet very easily accessible.Now, this keeps the interface and the program's workspace nice and clean, yetat the same time it puts virtually every tool within easy access and only acouple of clicks away.

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